There are known popular presentation systems and software, such as Microsoft's PowerPoint® presentation system typically used in Windows environments. Apple's Keynote® presentation system for Mac and iOS environments, or Google's Slides presentation system for use with a web interface. The foregoing presentation software makers also provide versions of their presentation applications which are usable on mobile devices, and in some cases which are also usable in other, less-typically-used, environments. Thus, for example, Microsoft PowerPoint is available in an iOS environment.
Reference is now made to prior-art related systems and methods for presentation and display of slides and speaker notes, examples of which are shown in FIGS. 1-3 and 6, and referring to prior-art editing and a printout of speaker notes, examples of which are shown in FIGS. 4 and 5. Prior-art speaker notes creation, formatting and display systems and methods on the market today have been more difficult to use than necessary, and they have lacked more user-friendly “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” (WYSIWYG) type preview, edit, display and print features as these relate to speaker notes creation and display.
Currently, while it has been possible to highlight certain speaker notes text, users of the aforementioned presentation system software also have not been given the capability to have changed the font color of the speaker notes from black and white at all. This has been an important limitation, since such would have allowed different, multiple, speakers on the same presentation to have used different colors of fonts in order to have been able to have easily identified who was to have been speaking.
But perhaps most importantly, prior art slides and speaker notes presentation systems have had a very cumbersome and hard-to-use feature, relative to a fundamental architecture and data structure of such prior-art systems, in that speakers have had to manually scroll through essentially one long speaker notes page for each slide. This has made it so that speakers have not been easily able to tell how long their speaker notes have been for a particular slide, and it has also made it so that using such prior-art software for presenting in a venue to audiences as shown and illustrated herein has been made more stressful and difficult.
As an example of the extra keystrokes needed to accomplish some limited types of edits to speaker notes available to speakers in edit mode, with a version of Microsoft's PowerPoint presentation application, in order to have increased the font size of the speaker notes for just some of the slides (i.e., so that one or more speakers would have been able to have read the speaker notes easily on a speaker notes monitor during the presentation), or to have added highlighting of certain words of the speaker notes for a presentation (i.e., for another speaker co-presenter), the speaker, or an assistant setting up the presentation, has had to take the following extra steps:                1) accessed the edit mode feature of the application—which mode, incidentally, is not the same mode as is used by speakers or their assistants during presentations;        2) clicked on “view”;        3) clicked on “outline view”;        4) clicked on “notes”;        5) right clicked on the pane that contains the thumbnail images of the slide desired for editing (or clicked directly on a thumbnail of the slide desired for editing);        6) clicked “show text formatting”;        7) made the desired edits; and        8) re-saved the file.        
All of this additional effort has been expended many times for many presentations by presenters, or their assistants, for example in edit mode of PowerPoint in order to have been able to have formatted the speaker notes in these ways to accommodate last minute requests by speakers. Note that the foregoing described prior-art method is not user friendly and has not easily provided a way that the speaker, or assistant, could have made and saved for later reference last-minute edits right on the spot. Thus, for example, it is known that once PowerPoint has been closed after enlargement of text has been accomplished, for example during showmode, or presentation mode, such enlargement edits have not been saved, and such enlargement edits would have been lost, unless the more lengthy procedure described had been followed. This fact, in turn, has made it more difficult for speakers, and their assistants to make last-minute edits, or configurations, to speaker notes—especially considering that a final draft of the speaker notes may have still been awaited from another speaker.
And while there have been some limited presentation mode edits able to have been made, namely having enlarged all speaker note text for a given presentation, or highlighting some speaker note text, this limited functionality of prior art systems has not allowed the more robust editing demanded by common situations encountered by speakers and their assistants, namely the ability to easily enlarge just some of the speaker notes. Multiply the effort described above by the average number of times this has happened for each presentation, and then by the total number of presentations that have been given, and this has led to very large numbers of hours spent editing and re-editing presentation speaker notes.
In rushed, high-emotional-pressure-filled, environments, where new presentation equipment perhaps unfamiliar to the speaker or assistant has been used, this extra effort has been repeated many times, and has led to greatly increased stress for speakers, and their assistants, often right before the show has had to go on before sometimes thousands of audience members. Thus, there really has been needed for years an improved system and method of easily implementing and saving last-minute speaker notes changes in a way that easily allows different font-sizes and colors for different speakers having different eyesight capabilities for reading smaller speaker notes text. Further, such an improved system has been needed for years which fundamentally alters the need for speakers to scroll through a long page of speaker notes.
Assuming a speaker had been even able to have accomplished such an increase in the font size of the speaker notes by following the many steps described above in an edit mode and re-saved presentation file, perhaps even having saved the speaker notes in a separate file, certainly this has not been user friendly and has not allowed for last-minute easy changes to the file by other speakers. Thus, for example, to have attempted to alleviate this very difficult situation of accommodating last-minute, and sorely-needed speaker notes font-size changes, there has actually developed a common practice among speakers, and their assistants, to have created two separate presentation files, wherein a first such file has been comprised of the substantive slides content to have been shown to the audience and on a speaker viewable confidence monitor, and wherein the second such file has been comprised only of the speaker notes re-typed into slides format, and in a separate file, requiring a separate computer for running the show for a separate monitor. In such a case, as illustrated with a slide show version of speaker notes 38 shown on a separate monitor 37 in FIG. 3, the two different presentation files have had different sets of graphics with different aspect ratios, etc., and undoubtedly many thousands of dollars have been spent for back-stage assistants to create such accommodation files for enabling speakers having differing eyesight and speaker notes characteristics preferences.
This resolution has had the drawback that it has been inefficient, but perhaps more importantly this resolution has been difficult to make sure that the two separate presentation files on two separate computers (with backups for each) have always been in sync for the speaker. Thus, responsive to the difficulty of this resolution, there has developed a practice of having employed an additional back-stage assistant for verifying that the slides and notes presentation files (i.e., two different slide shows) have been in sync. This has been necessary so that the speaker would not have lost his or her place in the notes and presentation slides while giving the presentation. In other words, this has not been an effective or efficient solution because it has still been very confusing to speakers and their assistants to try and keep straight what slide the speaker should have been on given the speaker notes presented.
And this situation has been exacerbated by the stress of speaking generally, attempting to keep everything, the presentation, the slides, and the speaker notes, all in sync (including the addition of two back-up computers—for a total of four computers to operate the presentation—one each for the original and backup presentation slides, and one each for the original and backup speaker notes files in a separate slide show presentation) so that the speaker's presentation hasn't become mixed up. And this, in turn, has put a lot of stress on back-stage assistants, thus oftentimes requiring an additional back-stage assistant referred to above operating another speaker notes monitor, again, just to keep the slides and speaker notes in sync.
Thus, such a dual file work-around has not been easily usable, and it has added to the stress of presentations, since the person operating the speaker notes monitor has had to manually ensure that the speaker notes and the slides have been in sync, or properly correlated, throughout the presentation. The complexity of such need for correlation may be summed up with a table as follows:
Assistant 2Assistant 1Assistant 1Assistant 2BackupSpeaker(listens to(listens toBackup SlidesSpeaker NotesSlides &speaker)speaker)(stays synced(stays syncedNotesSlidesSpeaker Noteswith Asst. 1)with Asst. 1)Slide 1 -Slide 1 - ClickNotes 1 - AutoSlide 1 - ClickNotes 1 - AutoClick to cueback stageNotes 1 -Notes 1 -Manual ScrollManual ScrollAnimationAnim. 1 - ClickNotes 1 -Anim. 1 -Notes 1 -Click to cueManual ScrollClickManual Scrollback stageSlide 2 -Slide 2 - ClickNotes 2 - AutoSlide 2 - ClickNotes 2 - AutoClick to cueback stageNotes 2 -Notes 2 -Manual ScrollManual ScrollEtc . . .Etc . . .Etc . . .Etc . . .Etc . . .
As a result, when the decision to employ an extra assistant to help make sure the systems have stayed in sync hasn't worked, there have been many times where speakers have, at the last minute, just decided to go ahead and make their presentations without their speaker notes, which in some cases has led to very poor presentations. Thus, these problems with the current system have led to additional stress around presentations and shows and have also led to lower-quality presentations and shows.
But what if a speaker's assistant had already set up a presentation file, maybe even for the second or third time, only to have had the speaker decide for yet another last-minute change? Indeed, this has happened, and perhaps even more common is the situation where the speaker has come into the venue and has said, 20 minutes before the presentation, “Here are my speaker notes. Can you please integrate these into the presentation with the other speaker?” As will be appreciated from the foregoing explanation, this seemingly simple request would actually have required the assistant to re-open the edit mode of the presentation, and to have gone through all the steps described above, again—requiring the assistant to have re-entered previous edits to the speaker notes made in any prior presentation mode edits. This has had to be done while another speaker has been making last-minute edits to that speaker's slides and notes, and even having done all of the foregoing, the final output by prior-art systems still hasn't been easy to use by speakers.
While it has been possible in the past to edit in presentation mode the text size of all speaker notes at once associated with a presentation, this has not been possible for the text size of just some of the speaker notes, e.g., for just a few of the slides of the overall presentation for one of the co-presenters. Further, note that editing the size of all the speaker note text in a presentation mode, or showmode, hasn't actually involved saving the edited text with a larger font size in the sense of a font size that a person can articulate easily, e.g., 12-point, or 24-point, but rather the speaker has had to tell the back-stage assistant to make the speaker notes 2, or 3, etc., sizes, or clicks, bigger to make them big enough to see. And since the notes have changed size since the speaker last saw them (for example causing different paragraph layouts), it has been very difficult for speakers to have known where they were in their notes—leading to the speaker having become lost in the middle of a presentation. What this has meant in terms of presentation mode accommodations is that each speaker has needed to change the size of their speaker notes when it has been their turn to speak, whereas the next speaker has often had to change the size back to the originally-desired size for that next speaker—leading to stress, confusion, and sometimes poor presentations by requiring additional steps by a speaker, or the speaker's assistant, before the speaker has even begun speaking.
And more importantly, even when the text size of all the speaker notes have been changed, such changes many times have not been able to be saved for subsequent presentations, especially if the presentation system program has been closed. Rather, the speaker, or the speaker's assistant, has had to re-setup the presentation at each new venue when changes have been made in presentation mode. Thus, in sum, any time the speaker, or the speaker's assistant, has closed the presentation mode of the presentation, the presentation mode edits to the speaker notes, limited as these edits have been, they have been lost. Thus, the speaker has never really known how many clicks bigger to tell the assistant to make the speakers notes (because there has been no reference size—just small-sized). This, of course, has wasted time, effort and money for speakers and their companies over the course of multiple presentations.
And again, exacerbating the problem of the need for differently-sized speaker notes, is the fact that the speaker notes have needed to have been scrolled by the speaker, or the speaker's assistant, to date. This has led to the problem that it has been difficult for a speaker to gauge how many notes there have been prepared for any given slide, and this has also led to difficulty in making presentations. For example, if after going through the long series of steps described above for enlarging the speaker notes to say a significantly larger type, in order to be large enough to be readily visible and usable by the speaker during the presentation, this has led to an even-longer screen of scrollable notes which have required the speaker, or the speaker's assistant, to have actively moused to the correct location on the notes while trying to speak to an audience. Or, in a totally scripted speech, this has required an operator for a speaker notes monitor, as described above, to manage movement of the notes while listening to the speaker to be sure that the speaker and the speaker notes have remained in sync.
The aforementioned issues have been most poignant and difficult to surmount in larger show or presentation venues, where the speaker has not been able to have a computer screen on a table right in front of the speaker as might be the case in a smaller venue, and where the speaker is out on a stage with just a slide advance or recession (move back) clicker or remote. In such larger venues, the speaker is out on a stage often with 10 to 20 feet, or more, between the speaker and a confidence monitor, or a speaker-notes monitor. In such settings, the speaker has had to rely on one or more back-stage assistants to change slides and speaker notes.
Therefore, further exacerbating the aforementioned problems have been the fact of miscommunications which have occasionally taken place between the speaker and the speaker's back-stage assistant. This, for example, has happened if the speaker has accidentally hit a slide advance button, without having had access (via excessive scrolling) to all of the speaker notes available for the previous slide, and this has resulted in the speaker having accidentally missed seeing all of the speaker notes. This miscommunication problem has happened quite frequently as a result of the limitations of current, prior-art, systems, and such miscommunications have led to a large number of speaker upsets. Furthermore, back-stage speaker assistants have been somewhat powerless to have done anything about such miscommunications, since the speaker has been onstage, and therefore the speaker has been somewhat out of communication with the speaker's assistant, such that speakers' assistants have been left to wonder whether the speaker hadn't wanted to talk about the rest of the slide as the speaker's assistant has advanced to the next slide.
This state of the prior art, of course, has not been conducive to an efficient editing, formatting, management or display of speaker notes, and therefore the prior art has created an ineffective management of speaker notes scenario in the past, and thus a more effective system of managing development, formatting, editing, previewing, and management of speaker notes is needed. Thus, there would be appreciated a speaker notes creating, editing, saving, formatting and display system which would allow a user to easily create, manipulate the text or font size of, and format, the text of the speaker notes, and which also would enable a user to save and combine the resulting speaker notes, into an easy to see, preview, and use fashion, while also allowing the speaker to easily operate the speaker notes for display purposes to the speaker during the presentation.
Confidence Monitor Technology
A well-known system for on-stage presentations by speakers is referred to as teleprompter. In FIG. 17, there is provided an illustration of upper and lower views of a currently-displayed-to-the-audience slide 1704 on an event display system 1702, and an illustration of a teleprompter-type confidence monitor 1706 with scrolling speaker notes 1708 and an activation line pointer 1710, all of which are typical of prior art presentation software and hardware systems.
Teleprompter is essentially a software system designed to assist speakers, and their assistants, to more easily present slide presentations, and other speeches, on stage. Per the teleprompter system, as shown in FIG. 17, a speaker is presented on the confidence monitor 1706 a scrolling version of the speech text 1708 that the speaker is to give. The confidence monitor 1706 is positioned either between the speaker and the audience, or at the back of the venue, so that the audience cannot see it, or at least is not readily aware of it.
A problem with such prior art-systems, and systems like them, is that the speaker notes text has not given any indication to the speaker where the speaker is relative to which slide in the presentation. In other words, all that has been shown on the teleprompter confidence monitor is a scrolling version of the speaker notes together with an activation pointer 1710. The activation pointer has let a speaker know where the speaker should be reading, and the speaker has thus been allowed to see some text ahead, as well as a line or two of text they have just read. Current activation pointers 1710 have not allowed the speaker to have known when text on the monitor has reached a location where a next slide has been displayed to the audience.
As shown in FIG. 18A, whereas a separate monitor 37 has been needed to provide for easy view by the speaker 30 of the current slide 33 to which the speaker notes 38 have pertained. And this has been somewhat, or at least potentially in many cases, problematic, since this has required not only that a back-stage assistant 34 has had to scroll the speaker notes on the confidence monitor 37, but also that the assistant, or another assistant 32, has had to click the slides for view by the audience to be sure the speaker has been presenting as to the correct slide and with the correct speaker notes in the correct position. With prior systems of thus having shown speaker notes to a presenter for presentation of slides to an audience, the back-stage assistant has been provided with a back-stage monitor as shown in FIG. 18B having thereon speaker note text 38 scrollable (forward or backward) by the back-stage assistant much like such text might otherwise have been scrollable with a typical word processing program, such as with a scroll wheel 1847 on a mouse. The onstage monitor 37, often referred to as a teleprompter, has had no such means of scrolling visible to the presenter.
Since the speaker notes in this situation have given no indication where the speaker has been relative to which slide, this has left entirely to the assistant 34 to listen to the speaker and to keep the presentation in sync as between speaker notes, slides, and synchronization relative to the speaker's words actually being spoken during the presentation. Furthermore, the potential issues that have been associated with the aforementioned situation have been exacerbated by situations where there have been miscommunications between the speaker 30 and the back-stage assistant 32, or where the speaker has decided to ad-lib during the presentation.
To minimize the possibility of miscommunications, and to help avoid such issues with losing the speaker's place during a presentation, there has developed a practice of having two assistants 32, 34 back stage, each having a set of equipment, one set of equipment and one assistant exclusively for advancing slides and slide builds, and another assistant and set of equipment to scroll the speaker notes on a teleprompter-type confidence monitor. Of course, this has been unduly expensive and complicated.
Further, as described previously herein, it has been difficult for presenters and their assistants to save changes to speaker notes and slides made during a presentation mode rehearsal, since changes made to the speaker notes during presentation mode have not been automatically updated and saved to a single presentation file.
With the advent of excellent speech recognition and artificial intelligence software capability, perhaps having back-stage assistants to control advancement of speaker notes and associated slides, animations, and slide builds, may be viewed as no longer necessary, and perhaps even wasteful.
Accordingly, there has been needed for years a solution wherein a speaker and the speaker's assistant could have been better supported in keeping the presentation in synchronization with the use of speaker notes and associated slides on a single confidence monitor system, and wherein edits to speaker notes and slides during rehearsal are captured and saved in a single presentation file. Further, perhaps in the near future there will come a desire for speakers on stage to have their speaker notes and slides presented in a fully-automated fashion by an artificially intelligent, fully computer controlled, “back stage assistant.”